Meaning of Life

What is/are the propelling factor(s) in your life? What gives your life meaning and motivates your life choices and direction?

Is it the thought of an afterlife?
Is it the desire for things such as passion, prestige, authority, wealth, close bonds with others, an improved world or self?
Is it broad, like the above, or a specific thought or goal ("My reason for living is to one day become a master at chess, and to see my children happy and successful in life")?
Or do you not have anything in particular that guides your life? You live to walk through life day by day to see what experiences it has to give you?
Or perhaps it's a combination of many things.

As time goes on, I increasingly find myself holding the view that desire is a good thing. For a long time I viewed a life devoid of passion to be the ideal, because with passion often comes pain and suffering. The greater the height, the greater the fall. But that also works the opposite way as well- the greater the pain, the greater the pleasure. I've experienced this with my job- I'll be so sore and exhausted after work that the simplest experiences when I get home (a warm shower, sitting on the couch under a soft blanket) make me feel euphoric and supremely relaxed.

I've slowly come to hold the belief that a major purpose of (my) life is to try to experience and enjoy everything life has to offer me, even the negative aspects. There's a quote I really like by writer Louise Erdrich that sums up my current mentality on the subject:


"Life will break you.
Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either,
for solitude will also break you with its yearning.
You have to love. You have to feel.
It is the reason you are here on earth.
You are here to risk your heart.
You are here to be swallowed up.
And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed,
or left, or hurt, or death brushes near,
let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples
falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

So the experience of new feelings and perceptions is one of the things that drives my life and gives it meaning. How about you?

http://www.templeofthejediorder.org/forum/Jediism/104036-answers-to-the-big-questions#110076

Whyte Horse wrote:

That is basically how I live my life...

Interesting topic Hypatia.

My life's meaning/purpose has always been to take life as it comes to me, and to be the best possible person I can be in response to whatever comes my way. It has been a real struggle most of the time to remain true to this purpose because of things I have experienced throughout my life, but I would like to think that despite the trials I have faced, I have remained true to that ideal.

I also believe that while having one's meaning and purpose in life revolve around a specific goal or destination can be beneficial for providing a source of structure and definition, if not treated with a certain level of respect and understanding can lead to chaos once that goal or destination has been reached/accomplished. By this I mean that one were to accomplish their life's goal without a plan of what would follow that event, they may find themselves in a state of listlessness and uncertainty about what to do with the rest of their lives. Putting all of one's eggs in a single basket and that such.

That.

Yes Proteus, that pretty much says it all. Extra points.

I also believe that while having one's meaning and purpose in life revolve around a specific goal or destination can be beneficial for providing a source of structure and definition, if not treated with a certain level of respect and understanding can lead to chaos once that goal or destination has been reached/accomplished. By this I mean that one were to accomplish their life's goal without a plan of what would follow that event, they may find themselves in a state of listlessness and uncertainty about what to do with the rest of their lives. Putting all of one's eggs in a single basket and that such.

I think that is very spot on. My entire youth was focused around getting into college and graduating, that I didn't think too much about what I would do afterwards, I just assumed things would naturally fall into place and I'd automatically be drawn to wherever I would be happiest and best suited. But that isn't how life works.

I think society in general puts too much emphasis on reaching external marker-points and accomplishing external goals. It's like the Alan Watt's talk on Music and Life. We act as though we will be radically happier when we reach a certain point in our lives, but after the novelty wears off we will ultimately be pretty much the same as before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoTmNU_5A0

You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!

~Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

"Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning." - Joseph Campbell

Purpose or meaning to my life... gosh I don't know that I can say I have one. I mean I generally hope to be a compassionate and caring person because I enjoy helping people. At the same time I feel no guilt in the selfishness of taking time for myself at the cost of not helping someone. Certainly there are physical and emotional issues I've developed over the years that I wish to resolve but those aren't really the point, just a thing to be addressed along the way. When I finish school I'd like to be an architect and make a difference in the world with my work but at the same time I'd be just as happy quietly writing anonymously as long as I had a special someone to stave off the loneliness with.

I suppose for me the closest thing to a point is this: The universe is vast and amazing and complicated while I am an incredibly tiny part of it. Yet the atoms in my body are made up of the stuff of many stars, multiple supernovas across the galaxy must have occurred to make me and that is amazing. I appreciate the wonder which is this universe and hope I help others do the same. I enjoy my life for what it is when it is and I hope I can help others do so as well because as much as notions of an afterlife may bring comfort to some, to focus on it to the exclusion of all else would leave all of this unappreciated. So I guess, in a round about sense, the meaning of life for me is living it. As the experiences I go through shape and mold me and experiencing me effects others, that is the meaning of my life.

This may just be a rambley roundabout way of expressing a variation on Kohadre's sentiment but I think expressing myself uniquely as I do is rather the point.

I think that there is no default meaning of life, and that one must assign meaning to their own. I believe the only obligation we are born with is the negative obligation not to harm, kill, or bother anybody else. I believe a person is morally free to end their own life whenever they choose, as long as it does not conflict with an obligation that thy have entered into voluntarily.

I got my daughter, that's all I can come up with.